Tuesday 18 December 2007

If you want rainbows, you've got to put up with the rain

Apologies for the Hallmark cardesque name, but I like the quote, from one of the great thinkers of our time - Dolly Parton. Now, chances are, I'll be one of the 95% or whatever it is of bloggers who write an opening post, then forget all about the blog they started and wander off back into cyberspace. In a year or two they'll remember the blog, try to log back in (probably to the wrong site), get annoyed, set up a new blog, be really determined to post lots in this new blog, keep it up religously for a week until real life intrudes and then forget all bout it again...until a year or two later.

So now I've lowered expectations, and you know I'm unlikely to appear again, why am I here, knowing that chances are this'll be one of very few entries? We-ellll..... I was reading The Pythons' Autobiography the other week and in one chapter I kept crying and crying and crying. Ok, so I am female, I'm more than a bit pregnant and I've just come off anti-depressants, but still - why was I crying so much? At Monty Python? And not even a sad story! Most of them were talking about words, and reading, and writing and how it opened a door for them. Not a door into gainful employment, or anything like that, just that it was an escape hatch into somewhere where they could glory in words, and forget all about whatever shittiness they were living through. And I kept thinking 'That was me! That's what I did! I wrote, constantly, obsessively, every day all day! Words were how I defined myself!' And I cried because I feel like I've lost that part of myself - I can't write so easily anymore, I have to consciously make the effort to write things down. And I feel like a part of me - the defining part of me from the time I learned to read and write is gone, and I don't know how to get that part, how to get 'me' back again.

And now...what am I really? I'm crap at my job - actually, no, I'm not crap at my job, just that there's not enough time for me to do all I need to do, so I'm just generally inefficient. J thinks I'm crap: brandishing bits of paper in my face to show me just how little he thinks of me, using the republican we to remind me of all that I haven't done... I'm a terrible mother - loving, yes, but pretty crap, really. I don't pull my weight at home. Everywhere I look in my life, everything is going wrong. I'm about to lose my business, my job, my home, my family maybe? Lose MJ/SD too, and it'd serve me right. So is it any wonder that I'm longing again to lose myself in something?